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About Formative Forces in the Plant World

Dick van Romunde’s book is the fruit of a life’s work spanning more than four decades and is based on his practice of plant observation as a meditative discipline. It is filled with precise botanical observations of many plants and illustrated with excellent color drawings by Elly van Hardeveld. Yet, this is more than just another plant guide, for its emphasis is on how plant forms (morphology) reveal the working of formative forces in Nature. What are formative forces? The author does not attempt an abstract definition. Indeed, there is only a brief introduction to the material, stressing the process of observation rather than conclusions. We are invited to use the author’s observations as examples for our discovery activity. The core teaching is that plant study involves a deep penetration by the senses, mind, and heart into the very activity of the formative forces. We cannot remain passive, detached onlookers with no relationship to what we observe. At the same time, our observation must be objective, in that it must be true to what we are observing, and not merely a projection of our inner moods or wishes (one of the problems with many so-called psychic “attunements”). In his preface to the book, Dr. Ernst Katz outlines three stages of Nature study as a spiritual practice. Goethe’s views about the plant world play an important role and penetrate this whole work. 

Perceiving Plants: Experiencing Elemental Beings

This title by R. van Romunde is a small booklet and a best seller possibly because it requires less work than the author’s “About Formative Forces in the Plant World” book. Perceiving Plants was originally written as a forward to the Dutch version of Rudolf Steiner’s “Man as Symphony of the Creative Word.”

About two hundred years ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe directed our attention to the attributes and secrets of outwardly perceptible nature. He told us about “the universally open holy secrets of nature that reveal themselves in the world of the sense-perceptible phenomenon if you know how to look.” Early in the 20th century, Rudolf Steiner connected this outwardly perceptible, visible world with the invisible world, saying they belong together and should be taken as a whole. In the book Perceiving Experiencing Elemental Beings, Dick van Romunde describes the gesture language of the plant world as he understands it from Goethe. This gesture language can be observed when we consider how the plant grows in the four elements of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. Pointing out the limitations of natural science based only on mechanical principles, he focuses the reader’s attention on the need to employ a way of thinking and an appropriate methodology that does not limit a true understanding of the subject under investigation. The book combines the spatial, sense-perceptible world of Goetheanistic natural science with the non-spatial world of feelings, thoughts, and will impulses found in anthroposophical spiritual science. Through Goetheanistic natural science, we can accumulate the spiritual forces necessary to understand the gesture language of nature. To accomplish this, we must develop non-judgmental memory pictures of our perceptions, the ability to concentrate on the pure image of perception, and strengthened thinking that leads us to a perceptive faculty of higher judgment. Rudolf Steiner describes the activity and gestures of four groups of elemental beings connected with the world of plants and animals and characterizes them as the dynamics of the four elements.